Stolen World by Jennie Erin Smith - Excerpt

Copyright © 2011 by Jennie Erin Smith
All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks

of Random House, Inc.
Photograph Credits
Endpapers and page 1: Roy B. Ripley;
page 83: Bill Love/Blue Chameleon Ventures
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Jennie Erin, 1973–

Stolen world : a tale of reptiles, smugglers, and skulduggery /
Jennie Erin Smith.
p. cm.
1. Reptile trade—United States—Anecdotes. 2. Wildlife
smuggling—United States—Anecdotes. 3. Animal dealers—
United States—Anecdotes. 4. Snakes—United States—
Anecdotes. I. Title.
SK593.R47S65 2011
364.1'33670973—dc22 2010009548
ISBN 978-0-307-38147-7
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Book design by Donna Sinisgalli

Illustrations by John Burgoyne
Jacket design by Oliver Munday
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
First Edition
Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd iv 11/3/10 11:18 AM

1
I F l y A r o u n d t h e Wo r l d
I n 1965, Henry A. Molt, Jr., took a sales job at Kraft Foods, where he was
given the use of a company station wagon and an exurb of Philadelphia
as his territory. Molt hated everything about the job except the station
wagon, which he would commandeer on weekends to visit zoos. Molt
had been collecting reptiles since the age of six, when he carried a sickly
king snake around school in a knotted sack; as he grew older, he sought
reptiles more far-flung and dangerous. Now, at twenty-five, he kept cobras,
rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, and pythons in the basement of his parents’
home.
Kraft Foods was proud of its eccentric young salesman, and mere
months after hiring Molt it put a drawing of a cobra—erect, hooded, and
ready for action—on the cover of its employee magazine, The Kraftsman.
Tucked next to a recipe for salmon loaf with cheddar sauce was an article
about Molt. Kraft Foods had dispatched a reporter to learn all he could
about Molt and his unusual hobby, which, Molt was happy to imply, in-
volved the occasional illegality:
Molt next showed me what he considered to be his most valuable

specimen. It was a beautiful Diamond python which had come
from Australia and for which he had paid $90. Molt says the Dia-
mond python is found only in Australia and New Guinea and is
fast becoming extinct. For this reason Australian authorities have
forbidden its exportation.
Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 7 11/3/10 11:18 AM

8 Jennie Er in Smith
“How did you get yours smuggled out?” I asked. Molt gave
me a sly glance but said nothing.
When Molt’s workdays of counting mayonnaise jars and issuing cred-

its for moldy cheese ended, he would retreat to his bedroom at his parents’
house and write letters to foreign animal dealers, whose addresses he’d
found in “The Animal People’s Directory,” a booklet that circulated in
those days to zoos and film studios. Molt wanted only the rare animals,
reptiles even the zoos couldn’t get, so he sought out dealers in countries
that restricted, or banned, the export of wildlife to the United States: Aus-
tralia, Mexico, Communist states. “I would follow the most obscure lead,”
Molt said. “If I saw a picture in National Geographic of a missionary holding
a snake, I would try to write him, too. Most of the letters probably never
reached their destinations.”
BEFORE RESIGNING himself to a career at Kraft, Molt had presented

Roger Conant, the Philadelphia Zoo’s curator of reptiles, with a gift of
some Mexican pit vipers. Molt hoped to curry favor with Conant and land
a job at the zoo, but Conant only thanked Molt for the snakes. Molt had
majored in English in college, not any sort of science, had spent most of
his time in a fraternity house, and, anticipating his graduation draft notice,
had enlisted in the marines, calculating correctly that they would be less
likely than the army to send him to Vietnam. He still owed the marine
reserves a weekend a month, and would for quite some time.
Molt’s tedium was broken by the monthly lectures of the Philadelphia
Herpetological Society, at the Academy of Natural Sciences. The academy
was one of Molt’s favorite places; by twenty-five he had already spent hun-
dreds of hours in its library, reading snake articles amid its ancient leathery
smells and glass cabinets.There Molt met Joe Laszlo, a Hungarian who had
escaped the Soviet invasion in a hay wagon bound for Austria, then emi-
grated to Philadelphia, where he maintained multitudes of lab rodents for

Stolen World 9
the Albert Einstein Hospital. Laszlo was tired of mice; all he’d ever wanted
was to work in a zoo, with snakes.
After his experience with Roger Conant, Molt doubted his chances
with the zoos, but even a bad zoo job would trump Kraft, so Molt and
Laszlo synchronized their meager vacation time and drove the Kraft station
wagon to zoos in Columbus, Ohio; Atlanta; and Fort Worth, Texas, all of
which were building new reptile houses.
The moneyed old northern zoos, like those in Philadelphia and the
Bronx, had long maintained reptile houses with interesting foreign spe-
cies, but at most zoos, “reptile house” traditionally meant a cement floor
scattered with half-starved local rattlesnakes that died every winter and
were replaced in the spring. By the mid-1960s, though, the smaller zoos
in the South and the West were talking about hundreds of species, climate
control, skylights, indoor jungles, and curving cages with nonreflective
glass. The new reptile buildings housed the aspirations of a crop of freshly
minted reptile curators, men weaned on the snake books of the 1930s, ’40s,
and ’50s, books by writers like Frank “Bring ’Em Back Alive” Buck; Ray-
mond L. Ditmars, the Bronx Zoo’s first reptile curator; Carl Kauffeld of
the Staten Island Zoo, a rattlesnake hunter; Clifford Pope of the American
Museum of Natural History, with his fondness for giant pythons and boas
and anacondas; and poor Karl Schmidt of Chicago’s Field Museum, who
loved African snakes and then died from one’s bite. The reptile curators at
the emerging zoos were only a generation removed from these snake writ-
ers, and they scrambled for rarities, competing fiercely with one another.
“Everybody wanted to get something somebody else didn’t have,” said
Wayne King, the Bronx Zoo’s curator of reptiles at the time.
MOLT AND LASZLO had no luck finding jobs in the new, high-tech zoos.
They returned to Philadelphia.
If they couldn’t work for zoos, they could buy and sell reptiles, they
decided. Together, they shipped a box of rattlesnakes to a laboratory in

Hungary, a deal for which they created a business name and an onionskin
letterhead. They called their fake firm the Philadelphia Reptile Exchange,
just to call it something. When Laszlo was eventually hired by a zoo, Molt
hung on to the stationery, on which he sent out more letters seeking rep-
tiles. Every so often, someone responded.
A man wrote from Holland, offering to sell Molt some Australian
reptiles. He was acting as an intermediary for his son, he said, who lived
in Australia.
Splendid, unique reptiles—straw-colored pythons with ebony heads,
bright green snakes that coiled elegantly over branches, river turtles with
piglike snouts—were tantalizingly abundant in Australia and New Guinea,
but very hard to get. Australia had some of the strictest wildlife laws in the
world, a result of its bad experiences with alien species. Rabbits, introduced
by hunters in the nineteenth century, had made a crumbled moonscape
out of its vast grasslands. Cane toads, native to South America, had been
introduced to eat beetles that plagued the continent’s sugarcane fields, but
they didn’t jump high enough to do even that; instead, they swelled to
the size of Chihuahuas, and their poison skin killed native predators. For-
eign species had done so much damage in such a short time that Australia
responded in the 1960s with a blanket ban: no foreign animals or plants
in, no native ones out, and the same went for its protectorates, like Papua
New Guinea. Only government zoos could send their representatives to
Australia or New Guinea and expect to return with animals, and even they
had a tough time of it.
Australian zoos were equally frustrated in obtaining foreign species,
which meant that any Australian zookeeper had the potential to become a
smuggling partner, and this Dutchman’s son turned out, to Molt’s surprise,
to be head keeper of the Melbourne Zoo. In 1965 he began shipping
Molt diamond pythons and carpet pythons in crates marked “china” and
“glassware.”
Just as this connection started to bear fruit, Molt received a letter from
Megot Schetty, the owner of Schlangenpark Maggia, a private snake zoo
on the Swiss-Italian border. Schetty was a widow of indeterminate age,
small and gray. Her scientist husband had been killed by a swarm of bees

Stolen World 11
in Africa. In her lush greenhouses, Schetty kept species Molt coveted: giant
hog-nosed snakes from Madagascar, vipers from Israel and Jordan. Schetty
sent Molt whatever animals he asked for. In return Schetty wanted what
every European snake fancier wanted: rare dwarf rattlesnakes from Arizona
and Mexico, maroon-and-orange-patterned corn snakes from the Caroli-
nas, the black, lustrous indigo snakes of Florida.
All this exchange was leaving Molt with a reptile collection of im-
pressive variety and value. In May 1966, Molt married and moved into an
apartment, but returned daily to his parents’ basement to feed his bushmas-
ters and fix the heat lamps on his Palestine vipers. His Kraft job became
harder to bear. “We’d have these regional sales meetings where the manag-
ers would say, ‘Okay, tigers, go out and get ’em!’” he said, “and they’d make
us growl like tigers as we went down the stairs—grrrrr!” At the company’s
annual convention in Chicago that year, the vice presidents dressed as cow-
boys, exhorting the team to “shoot for higher sales.” Molt had just about
had it. He spent the Sunday of the convention alone at the zoo, where
he saw alive, for the first time, a Dumeril’s boa from Madagascar. There is
nothing particularly spectacular about a Dumeril’s boa—it is brown, it is
not too big, it hides in the leaf litter. But the sight of one ignited something
in Molt, who was by then fairly combustible.
On the plane back to Philadelphia, Molt sat next to an executive from
IBM, fresh out of a similar convention. The man asked Molt what kind of
business he was in.
“I fly all around the world collecting animals for zoos,” Molt answered.
Somehow, it sounded more natural than the truth.
MOLT’S IDEAL was not without precedent. Natural history had always
been an outsourced business. Someone had to fill the cabinets of curios-
ity, to steal the world from the world and bring it back, or no one would
believe it.
Even Carolus Linnaeus had his students do the collecting for him. Of

the seventeen young men who scoured the earth for the Swede, whose
own farthest journey was to Lapland, just over half survived their travels,
and one went mad. The students died of malaria in Java, North Africa,
and Guyana; of fever in the East Indies, tuberculosis in Turkey; gastroen-
teritis in Guinea; suicide on a Russian steppe. None of this discouraged
their successors as the centuries wore on, as the royal cabinets grew into
royal museums and as wars and revolutions opened those museums to
the public, which only wanted to see more specimens. The trouble was,
collecting them required a tougher constitution than most of the leaf-
sketching aristocrats who walked those museum halls possessed. In 1819
France’s Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, insatiable in its appetite for
life pickled, pressed, mounted, and dried, began training young men from
working-class families as traveling naturalists, who would shoot, label, and
preserve on behalf of those who preferred not to. It sent these mercenaries
of natural history to Madagascar, India, and Australia, where they, too, often
met splendid misfortunes. Many of the young travelers hoped that this
route would provide them a back door into science, but generally, if they
were lucky, they found work as taxidermists. There simply weren’t enough
museum jobs to go around, and the well-born occupied the best posts.
Natural history’s class divide deepened as the traveling field men, the
shooters and baggers, came to view themselves as the true naturalists.They
saw life in the field, with its complex interactions, whereas all that hap-
pened in museums, sneered the English collector Philip Gosse, was that
“distorted things are described, their scales, plates, feathers counted; their
forms copied, all shriveled and stiffened as they are; their colours, changed
and modified by death or partial decay, carefully set down; their limbs,
members, and organs measured and the results recorded in thousandths of
an inch; two names are given to every one; the whole is enveloped in a
mystic cloud of Graeco-Latino-English phraseology . . . and this is Natural
History!”
But the museum men kept wanting, so the collectors kept collecting.
Natural history became a veritable industry as the Victorian age advanced,
with elite taxidermy firms holding their own stables of collectors, steering
them toward the profitable species, those the museums most desired.

Stolen World 13
Were it not for such firms, a young Alfred Russel Wallace might well
have remained a frustrated lecturer at the Victorian equivalent of a com-
munity college, pinning the beetles of Leicester and reading Charles Dar-
win’s Voyage of the Beagle as he drifted off to sleep. It was Samuel Stevens,
a specimen dealer, whom the twenty-four-year-old Wallace approached in
1847 about an expedition to Brazil to collect insects that Stevens would
sell to the British Museum.
Seven years had passed since Charles Darwin, born into the Wedg-
wood pottery fortune, had secured his fame and a permanent seat among
the science Brahmins of London with an account of his Beagle journey,
nearly a year of which was spent in Brazil. Wallace, a middle-class amateur,
could hope to make a similar trip only by collecting for money. His three-
year turn in Brazil was marred by heartbreaking setbacks—shipments held
up at ports for his failure to bribe, and a cargo fire that destroyed all his
specimens and his notes. In 1855, Wallace was back in the field, collecting
for Stevens in the Malay Archipelago, when he mailed to Stevens a rather
ambitious-sounding monograph, “On the Law Which Has Regulated the
Introduction of New Species.” The obscure specimen collector, on the
fringes of science, had touched upon the mechanism by which species
changed or died off, edging close to Darwin’s still-unpublished theory of
natural selection.
In February 1858, while shooting birds of paradise in eastern Indone-
sia, Wallace contracted malaria. In the ensuing fevers, he seized on what he
needed to round out his theory, which he drafted in two days and mailed
to Charles Darwin, whom he greatly admired, for an opinion. It had been
a century since Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae had attempted to put Creation
in order; here, Wallace laid bare its secret law. The life of wild animals,
wrote Wallace, is a “‘struggle for existence,’ in which the weakest and least
perfectly organized must always succumb.”
What happened next is well-known: The similarities caused Darwin
and his colleagues to panic. The result was a hasty joint reading of both
men’s works at the Linnaean Society in London, an arrangement that pro-
tected the “priority” of Darwin’s theory while acknowledging Wallace’s
independent formulation of a like one.

When Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or

the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published in 1859,
Wallace was back in the jungle, skinning his primates, pinning and labeling
his insects. He had a living to make. Six years later, he was still in Borneo,
shooting orangutans for Stevens. In May 1865, he wrote: “I found another,
which behaved in a similar manner, howling and hooting with rage, and
throwing down branches. I shot it five times, and it remained dead on the
tree . . . I preserved the skin of this specimen in a cask of arrack, and prepared
a perfect skeleton, which afterwards was purchased for the Derby Museum.”
By his final return, Wallace had amassed some 125,000 specimens,
1,000 of them new to science.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Darwin was dead, Wallace sur-
veyed his gardens from a wheelchair, and the specimen collectors contin-
ued in the perilous ministry of science, skinning and preserving for their
distant patrons. England’s Walter Rothschild, the most prodigious, gener-
ous, and voracious museum man who ever lived, employed no fewer than
four hundred—this not counting the insect men—to fill his personal zoo
and museum in Hertfordshire. Most of Rothschild’s field men were also
adventurers of limited means, who died now and then of typhoid, cholera,
dysentery, and yellow fever; one had his arm bitten off by a leopard. Roth-
schild’s niece and biographer, Miriam Rothschild, worried for them. “[If]
they survived the occupational health hazards of their trade, they seemed
to lose much of their joie de vivre as time went by,” she wrote. “Bouts of
fever and other tropical diseases undermined their constitution, and they
lost their sense of well being. Furthermore they were rarely able to save
any money for an honourable retirement, and the life they led did not fit
them for so-called civilization.”
When specimen mania leaped, like a long-reaching brush fire, to the
New World, the same roughed-up collectors came to work for American
institutions. America’s natural history craze had been delayed by the Civil
War, and in the years after it ended, new museums and zoos went up fast.
The scramble for specimens was every bit as intense as it had been in Eu-
rope. But at least there was a place for the field men in America. With no
scientific aristocracy firmly established, anyone was free to take part. P. T.

Stolen World 15
Barnum, a museum man before he was ever a circus man, promoted natu-
ral history like some sort of patent medicine, a cure for the discontents of
an industrial age, and though Barnum’s version of natural history included
taxidermic hoaxes like his “Feejee mermaid,” a fish sewn to a monkey, he
forged lifelong ties with the curators at the Smithsonian, Harvard, and the
American Museum of Natural History, donating dead animals to them and
underwriting their expeditions. When William Temple Hornaday, a speci-
men collector, buffalo hunter, and the Smithsonian’s chief taxidermist for a
time, started the National Zoo, he brought Barnum on as a consultant.The
zoo’s head keeper was hired away from Barnum’s circus.
In 1906, Hornaday left Washington to build the Bronx Zoo, where
he added to its exhibits a vast number of horns and mounted heads. The
horn craze had started in England, with trophies from African safaris, but
it suited America, where natural history was fast becoming a more macho
affair. The eighteenth-century naturalist wandering the Jardin des Plantes,
filling notebooks with musings on lichens—this would not do. The new
naturalist was rugged to the extreme. The Nile and the Amazon were no
objects to him, and he emphasized, over all else, the dangers of his journeys:
glaring lions, flesh-munching piranhas.The new naturalist was meaty, bass-
voiced, the fictional Professor Challenger of A. Conan Doyle; or he was
like the real-life Theodore Roosevelt, a hybrid of naturalist and sportsman:
fearless, yet virtuous. Not content with merely shooting and stuffing, he
brought the best of his animals back alive.
The next crop of field men embraced the new ideal, and then
some. In the 1920s and ’30s Frank Buck, of Gainesville, Texas, wore a
mustache and pith helmet and collected for American zoos their tigers,
snow leopards, pygmy water buffaloes, and crocodiles. This involved sub-
stantial risks in the days before tranquilizer darts, and Buck’s adventures
building traps and bossing around natives became fodder for his wildly
popular, if ghostwritten, books. Buck’s formal education had ended in
middle school, a fact he was always touchy about, but he called himself
a scientist when it suited him. In Bring ’Em Back Alive, Buck explained
why he deserved the title, disparaging the museum men like his forebears
a century earlier:

I know a man on the staff of a great museum who by the hour

can trace back for centuries the feathered ancestors of birds that I
have collected by the thousand . . . This man is an authority even
though he has never left the United States. He is primarily a stu-
dent. I am a student, too, but in a different way. I have had to make
a study of such hard-boiled details of the collecting business as the
best way to get a snarling tiger out of a pit cage without getting
messed up in the process, how to transfer a murderous king cobra
from a crude native container to a modern snake box.
Rather than shirk from the field men’s affronts, the museum men just
borrowed their testosterone.
As a very young man, Raymond L. Ditmars had toiled unhappily in
the entomology department of the American Museum of Natural History,
starved for adventure, labeling insects and keeping a live rattlesnake on his
desk, waiting for the day the museum opened a reptile department. But
the museum was slow to do that, and Ditmars quit in frustration. Ditmars’s
friends feared that he’d thumbed his nose at the scientific establishment a
tad rashly for a young man with only a high school degree, at a time when
college was starting to mean something at zoos and museums. In 1899
Ditmars was relieved to be hired by W. T. Hornaday as the Bronx Zoo’s
first curator of reptiles.
Within a decade Ditmars had penned two books: Snakes of the World
and Reptiles of the World. Theodore Roosevelt, president at the time, liked
them enough to send Ditmars a letter, but they were dry, survey-like vol-
umes, nothing to read with a flashlight under the covers.Then, in the early
1930s, Ditmars retooled the same books into wild collecting yarns that
proved far more popular.
Stretched in undulating fashion in the trunk of a fallen tree, lay

the big “cotton-mouth.” Huge he looked in the light of our lamp,
his sides showing olive green, while the rough scales of the back
seemed as black as velvet. Slowly turning toward the boat he gave
us a glassy stare and a flash of forked tongue. It was easy work slip-

Stolen World 17
ping a noose over that wicked head, when we swung him, writh-
ing furiously, into the boat.
A strong odor of Frank Buck now permeated Ditmars’s prose. Indeed

Ditmars and Buck knew each other well. Buck collected for the Bronx
Zoo and boasted in his books of his services to “Dr. Ditmars, America’s
greatest reptile authority.” And Buck had taught Ditmars that in the public
imagination, the quest for the specimens mattered more than the speci-
mens themselves.
By the time Ditmars died, in 1942, the great museum and zoo expe-
ditions had ended. Museums found themselves bloated with specimens,
some of which were burned deliberately in bonfires. Specimen collecting,
one of the few reliable business opportunities natural history had ever
provided, had become unprofitable and in certain cases illegal. Few of
America’s once-copious taxidermy firms survived the Second World War.
But Ditmars’s fraying, yellowing volumes long outlived their author.
The reptile curators at the new zoos had devoured them in their youth; a
young Hank Molt all but memorized them.
In the long-reaching light of the Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, middle
school library, Molt had read his favorite part of Ditmars’s autobiography,
Thrills of a Naturalist’s Quest, over and over. In it, a teenage Ditmars, alone
in his parents’ attic, opens his first crate of serpents, fresh off a ship from
Trinidad: a rat snake, a tree snake, a coral snake, a fer-de-lance, and finally
a very large and deadly bushmaster, which Ditmars pauses, appropriately
enough, before unveiling: “It made considerable displacement in the bag,
and where its sides pressed outwardly upon the cloth, rough scales showed
through like the surface of a pine cone . . .”
“When he opened that box I was right there beside him,” Molt said.
“Each snake was a ceremony, a transformation.” He stole the book.
In his high school years, Molt made contact with the surviving con-
temporaries of Ditmars and Buck, adopting, gradually, the posture of a so-
phisticated herpetologist. He wrote Roger Conant, the Philadelphia Zoo’s
curator of reptiles, to request information about rat snakes—specifically,
how he could get some. Conant advised that the fifteen-year-old Molt try

to “get into the country, far away from Philadelphia, and take a look.” But
at fifteen one cannot get far away from anything, and all Molt had were
his books.
“Ditmars working in the museum for ten cents a day, with all these
stern people,” Molt said. “Frank Buck going to get rhinos or elephants
ninety fucking years ago, when there was no treatment for malaria, just
some gin and tonics when you got a chance. Overcoming these odds like
they were nothing.” They were inspiration enough.
MOLT QUIT Kraft Foods. With his mother-in-law’s money, he bought a

pet store in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia. He sold puppies and
kittens and continued to receive his special packages from Melbourne and
from Maggia, Switzerland. In September 1966, he mailed to zoos a mim-
eographed sheet introducing himself as Henry A. Molt, Jr., proprietor of
the Pet Emporium: “We specialize in rare and unusual reptiles and are
currently importing many species seldom seen in captivity! Are you inter-
ested in specimens from Madagascar, Australia, New Guinea, Israel, North
Africa, Ghana, Thailand, Argentina, and Peru to mention several?” On the
back he listed the thirty-five species he had.
“Within days the phone started ringing off the hook at my parents’
house,” Molt said. He made up his prices on the spot, and they were out-
rageous. The zoos were not deterred. They could spend months negotiat-
ing, with meager success, for Australian export permits, or they could pay
through the nose. Molt, who had earned $400 a month at Kraft, made
$5,000 that week. He never sent out another mailing as the Pet Emporium.
From now on he was the Philadelphia Reptile Exchange.
Molt quickly gained repute as a boutique dealer, someone with ex-
cellent taste, if such a thing can be said, in reptiles. In list after list, Molt
increasingly made mention of his animals’ aesthetic “perfection.” “To all
Zoological Parks & Museums,” he began his mailings. “Enclosed you will
find our latest listing of reptiles. Unless noted otherwise all specimens are

Stolen World 19
perfect display quality.” He joined the American Association of Zoological

Parks and Aquariums and learned to play the curators well, seeking animals
that would foster competition and garner high prices. The Carnegie Mu-
seum bought any of his reptiles that died.
With each list, Molt’s descriptions grew longer and more emphatic:
“Calabar’s ground python (Calabaria reinhardti) VERY RARE!! Bur-
rowing python from limited range in West Africa. Gun metal blue and
brick red, $200. Australian water python (Liasis f. fuscus) rich glossy brown
with bright apricot belly, rare in U.S. Zoological collections, collected in
N. Queensland, Aust. $325.” Some of his animals were so seldom seen that
he had to describe what they ate, the natural landscape they inhabited, or
the dead museum specimen from which they were known. He did noth-
ing to hide the fact that his best specimens were taken in violation of
foreign laws.
Which wasn’t, at the time, much of an issue. In the mid-1960s, little
thought was given to regulating the animal trade, a business that was “to-
tally devoid of conscience in those days,” Molt said. A gorilla was about the
only animal that required a special permit to import. Medical research labs,
carnivals, game farms, and pet stores relied on cheap and copious imports
of wild animals. The animals were transshipped through import firms in
Florida, giant wholesale warehouses where nursing baby monkeys were
crated without their mothers, parrots came in with half the box dead, and
profits were made by drastically marking up what survived. Some two mil-
lion reptiles were imported every year through these channels, and though
the vast majority were farmed baby turtles meant for dime stores, the rest
were wild. Stressed, dehydrated, and full of parasites, few survived far past
the point of sale.That the animal trade could be cruel and wasteful was not
news to members of conservation groups like the Audubon Society and
the newly formed World Wildlife Fund, which were pressuring govern-
ments to curtail it. But a middle-class family could still return from Florida
in those years with a baby alligator, and once in a while a forklift driver
at an airport would drop a whole crate of monkeys, sending blood and
entrails all over the place.
Only smuggling animals from one of the few “closed” countries, like

Australia or Mexico, violated federal law, and that law was the Lacey Act,
a largely forgotten turn-of-the-century hunting statute that made it illegal
to import game, live or dead, in contravention of a foreign law.
So Molt saw little cause for restraint. His zookeeper in Melbourne
scheduled the big shipments of snakes, lizards, and turtles for around
Christmas, when postal and cargo workers were overwhelmed. If a ship-
ment contained venomous snakes, the package was mislabeled on the out-
side. Inside was a warning sticker, “in case the guy got bit,” Molt said. “If
they opened it that much we were fucked anyway.”
Every year Molt’s ledgers grew longer.With the exception of a woman
wrestler who slept with snakes in her bed, his big customers were all zoos.
The Houston Zoo bought four thousand dollars’ worth of animals from
Molt in 1968, when a Triumph Roadster cost three thousand. Roger
Conant, whom Molt had only a few years before pressed for a job, wrote
Molt that the Philadelphia Zoo’s old reptile house was being torn down to
make room for a bigger one with a crocodile-filled “jungle river,” among
other marvels. “We will be in the market for many things,” Conant told
Molt, “and perhaps you might be able to help us obtain them.”
Molt’s timing couldn’t have been better. Zoos were suddenly inter-
ested in reptiles, but weren’t particularly good at breeding or caring for
them. Mortality was always high, and in a period when exhibits were ex-
panding, a good dealer relationship helped. What if you walked into your
jungle river one morning and found the crocodiles belly-up?
THANKS TO Megot Schetty in Switzerland, Molt now had the Dumeril’s

boas that had enraptured him in his final days at Kraft. Jonathan Leakey,
son of the famous paleoanthropologists in Kenya, was sending him African
dwarf adders. But the Australian animals were by far the most profitable,
and Molt suddenly found himself with a serious supply glitch there.
After a long silence from Melbourne, the zookeeper’s father sent

Stolen World 21
Molt an obituary: His son had died, at only thirty-seven, of a heart attack
brought on by obesity.
Molt needed another Australian smuggler. The Australian animals had
become Molt’s specialty, and if he didn’t keep them coming in, the zoos
would find them elsewhere. He turned to the widow Schetty, who was
always good for a contact.
Schetty gave him a woman’s name: Gisela Szoke, of Perth. She didn’t
know much about the woman, she confessed. Molt tapped out a letter.
A man responded. His name was Henry, too—Henry Szoke, the
brother of Gisela. Gisela didn’t deal in reptiles, it turned out; Henry did.
Henry Molt and Henry Szoke corresponded for a year. They experi-
mented with boxes of different materials and dimensions. Now and then
they failed. A box of baby crocodiles was intercepted in Australia when
an inspector felt air holes. A taipan mailed to Philadelphia in a cookie tin
came in dead and rotten. Air holes had to be concealed, and cookie tins
were out. When shipments were large, Szoke sent them in red shipping
crates labeled “art.”
Henry Szoke shared Molt’s interest in rare and obscure species, and
had good smuggling techniques. Molt paid him cash, which he mailed in
Hallmark cards. Almost everything Szoke sent arrived healthy. Molt barely
missed the ill-fated zookeeper he had earlier depended on. Between price
lists, Molt sent out bulletins of “specials,” whatever was fresh from Szoke.
The Bronx Zoo emerged as a major buyer of Szoke’s New Guinea croco-
diles. The Dallas Zoo had a thing for his Australian lizards.
Without Henry Szoke, Henry Molt was nobody. “He was the steak,”
Molt said. “Everyone else was pickles.”
THANKFULLY, MOLT’S institutional clients seldom visited his retail shop,

whose giant sign still said “Pet Emporium,” and whose shady frat-house
atmosphere contrasted sharply with the scholarly tone of his mailings.

Fellow reptile dealers, carny snake handlers, kids from the suburbs, small-
time poachers with something to unload—all found a hangout there. In
place of the kittens and puppies, which he’d expunged, Molt kept a hatch-
ling snapping turtle in a glass jar by the register, feeding it and changing
the water until, like a living ship in a bottle, the thing had grown so big it
could not escape. At which point the “snappy in a jar” would be liberated
with a hammer, and a new one would take its place.
The apartment upstairs was occupied by an ex-convict named Bob
Udell, a bearish young man in and out of mental institutions and jail, who
would set police cars on fire, or shoplift large quantities of meat. Udell
decorated his apartment with bead curtains and a naked mannequin lying
in a coffin. He darkened his windows because it reminded him, in a com-
forting way, of jail. Udell was nonetheless very good with rare snakes, and
became a constant presence in Molt’s shop, a quasi employee. “Udell had a
talent with the animals. He could walk by a cage and see a snake not lying
right, and sure enough the animal was dehydrated,” Molt said. “Plus you
couldn’t make him go away—he would burn your house to the ground.”
Udell minded the store and packed up the reptiles for deliveries. Molt, the
only one around with any college, drove the boxes to zoos in a Volkswagen
minibus, and did all the talking.
A PECULIAR man phoned the Philadelphia Reptile Exchange one day.

He sounded like a hillbilly, almost cartoonishly so, and yet he was on his
way to Madagascar, he told Molt, “to get some lemurs.” He was thinking
of picking up some snakes while he was there. “The problem is,” the man
said, “I can’t tell one from the other.” He was on his way to Philadelphia,
he said, right now.
The hillbilly turned out to be a towering, freckled, elfin-eared man
named Leon Leopard. He lived in Waco, Texas, on a street called Parrot
Street. Leopard was new to the animal business. He owned a string of gas

Stolen World 23
stations, and, like many station owners in an era of cheap gas, had resorted
to gimmicks to boost sales. Leopard’s gimmick was live monkeys. So for a
certain number of fill-ups you could have a free squirrel monkey.
Leopard bought his monkeys from Miami’s biggest animal importer in
those days, a man named Bill Chase, whose compound housed ostriches,
tigers, all manner of parrots, venomous snakes, ponds filled with alligators
and marine toads and tortoises soaking in the sun. Chase’s monkeys arrived
on night flights from Peru, a thousand at a time. It occurred to Leopard,
the first time he drove to Miami and saw Chase’s incredible, teeming place,
that there might be money to be made in the animal business. What was
the most valuable monkey of all? he asked Chase. Lemurs, Chase told him,
which are not actually monkeys, he explained, but another sort of primate,
found only in Madagascar. Leopard left Miami thinking about lemurs, and
Madagascar. He checked in at the zoos, where the curators told Leopard
that there were Madagascar snakes worth money, too. They handed him
Molt’s price list.
Leopard was impressed with Molt’s business, and Molt was impressed
with Leopard. For a yokelish Texan who owned gas stations and spoke no
French, Madagascar was not an easy trip. Besides being isolated, poor, and
barely navigable, it was in the middle of a Marxist insurgency that would
soon sever it from France. The country was literally burning—political
points were made by torching thousands of hectares.
Leopard left for Madagascar wearing a gas station uniform that he
had converted into a zoo uniform with the addition of a few patches. He
carried doctored stationery, too, with his own name printed under the
Central Texas Zoo’s logo with the title “Director of Zoo Biology.” Leopard
returned from Madagascar with the rarest of the rare—lemurs, boas, plow-
share tortoises—all with stamped permits from the Ministère des Eaux et
Forêts. Molt could barely contain his awe or his envy.
Now Leopard wanted to fly to Papua New Guinea, where it had been
only a decade since the Australians outlawed cannibalism. The populace
was so notoriously hot-tempered that the American embassy advised visi-
tors to keep driving if they hit someone’s dog on the road. Leopard urged

Molt to come along. But Molt still owed the marines one weekend a
month. If Molt couldn’t come and lend his knowledge, Leopard suggested,
perhaps he could supply some cash.
They agreed that Molt would put up $2,000, and that Leopard would
go collect the elusive Boelen’s python, an iridescent black-and-white snake
from the highlands. No one had ever returned from New Guinea with a
live Boelen’s python, but the snakes had been studied sporadically since
the 1930s, and a few sat pickled in museums. Molt scrutinized the jarred
Boelen’s pythons at the Academy of Natural Sciences and studied a map
of New Guinea, pinning it with locales from the museum labels. At least
Leopard would know where to look. Molt and Leopard agreed to sell the
animals together, and split any profits.
Leopard readied his fake zoo stationery and his fake zoo uniforms. He
carried Molt’s map.
Leopard fared even better in New Guinea than he had in Madagascar.
Wildlife officers found him a coffee farmer in the highlands who was
also a government-licensed animal collector. The coffee farmer provided
Leopard with not only Boelen’s pythons but also birds of paradise and
oddball indigenous mammals. It took Molt and Leopard a whole year
to sell everything; Molt had to run a two-for-one special on tree kanga-
roos, which he kept in dog kennels and tried to feed figs. “I was freak-
ing out. I didn’t know how to take care of them,” he said, and he hated
mammals, anyway. Molt and Leopard drove to the zoos in Leopard’s
Cadillac, entertaining zoo directors at restaurants, where Leopard en-
raptured them like a country preacher. “He had really good stories—
probably many of them bullshit but they sounded good,” Molt said. “All
we’d seen was Wild Kingdom and National Geographic. Here was a guy
who’d been there.” Molt was increasingly enamored of the Texan, as
were the zoos. “Leon made a very, very rapid rise,” said Robert Wagner, a
longtime president of the American Association of Zoological Parks and
Aquariums. “He knew frightfully little about animals—he was for most of
his life the equivalent of a used car salesman. But he just became fascinated
with it.”

Stolen World 25
THE MARINES cut Molt loose in the summer of 1970. In anticipation

of this day, Molt solicited requests from the zoos, just the way Leopard
had done. He purchased himself an around-the-world ticket: Philadelphia–
London–Lagos–Accra–Johannesburg–Maputo–Antananarivo–Nairobi–
Cairo–Istanbul–Frankfurt–Philadelphia. He carried new business cards
stamped with the logo of the American Association of Zoological Parks
and Aquariums:
HENRY A . MOLT, J R .
ZOOL OGICA L EXPED IT ION
Au thor i ze d Agen t for:

L INCOL N PA R K Z OO
100 W. WEB ST ER AVE.
CHICAGO, IL L . U. S. A .
The Lincoln Park Zoo, in its lust for lemurs, had furnished Molt with
these nominal credentials. Its assistant director sent him a wish list: “At
present we need a female White-fronted, female Red-fronted and male
Fat-tailed Dwarf Lemur . . . we also want ruffed, either color phase, Black
Lemurs and Crowned Lemurs . . . if you can come up with Gray Gentle
Lemurs (Hapalemur) we’d be interested in those too.”
Molt had no idea what he was doing. He had a map of Africa, a hand-
ful of contacts, and the vicarious experience of Leon Leopard to go on.
If he could get lemurs, he would, but lemurs didn’t keep him up at night.
What did was the Angolan python, deemed by the Guinness Book of World
Records to be “the world’s rarest snake.” None of the zoo people had seen
one alive, or even a decent photo of one; all Molt could find was a photo

with a grainy image of a dead specimen in liquid, from an old German

article in the Academy of Natural Sciences. He could barely make out its
pattern.
When he got to Accra, Molt headed for the university in search of
snake people. He found some American graduate students and installed
himself in their rental house. The authorized zoological expedition of the
Lincoln Park Zoo then blasted through the cacao plantations of Ghana in
a Land Rover, finding Gaboon vipers, Cameroon toads, and ropelike ag-
gregations of army ants that could be lifted with a stick. Here and there
they stopped to pull stunts on local people. They picked up a hitchhiker,
but only after measuring his arms and legs; they explained that they were
selling him to a shaman, laughing mercilessly as he fled the Land Rover
into the darkening forest.
The students shipped Molt’s snakes and toads back to Philadelphia.
Molt flew to South Africa. To actually try to collect an Angolan python in
its native range would be suicidal. The snakes occurred on the Namibian-
Angolan border, a mined war zone patrolled by South African and Cuban
troops and an independent faction of guerrillas. But an Afrikaner naturalist
promised to find Molt four—his contacts were brave or desperate enough
to cross minefields for snakes—and send them cash on delivery. Molt con-
tinued with confidence to Madagascar, where he stormed about the of-
fices of the Ministère des Eaux et Forêts, acting the veteran zoo collector,
seeking lemurs for his sponsors in Chicago.The officers were not budging:
Duke University’s lemur experts had by then effected a ban on the collec-
tion of lemurs by anyone but themselves.
Molt loudly invoked the name of Leon Leopard, director of zoo biol-
ogy at the Central Texas Zoo. He worked very closely with Leopard, he
told the bureaucrats, and Leopard would not be pleased to hear about his
ill treatment.
While Molt was trying to look indignant, a wiry man gestured to him
from the hallway. It was Leon Leopard’s guide, Folo Emmanuel. Within
days Emmanuel and Molt were in the Perinet national forest, stuffing
reptiles into bags. They slept in Emmanuel’s smoke-filled hut, eating fish
tails with Emmanuel’s children, an arrangement Molt could tolerate only

Stolen World 27
briefly. He tried to sleep on the floor at a nearby train station, because that
was more comfortable, until after a few days he gave up on the lemurs, and
on Madagascar. He departed for Kenya with a single sack of Madagascar
ground boas in his luggage. At the Nairobi Intercontinental he ordered
room service.
At noon the next day Molt gathered his snakes and his suitcase and
rented a tiny Fiat.The man at the rental firm asked him if he had any plans
to leave the city with it. This was not, he emphasized, a car that could be
driven into the bush. “Hell, I know that,” Molt said, and started immedi-
ately toward the estate of Jonathan Leakey, two hundred miles to the north.
As Molt drove, the pavement became dirt, the dirt became stones, and the
stones grew grapefruit-sized, then pumpkin-sized, until finally one broke
the Fiat’s manifold and killed it. In the early evening, somewhere on the
high plain spanning Kenya and Ethiopia, Molt found himself alone with
his snakes. A group of Masai shepherds passed. They regarded Molt with
what may or may not have been pity, then moved on. Roger Conant had
advised the teenage Molt to get far away from Philadelphia. This he had
accomplished. “I figured I would be eaten by lions or hyenas or some-
thing,” Molt said.
A few hours later, at dusk, Molt was rescued by some passing Kenyan
soldiers. He jumped onto their Land Rover and waded with them through
a chest-deep river, carrying his snakes and his bags above his head.The sol-
diers dropped him off at Leakey’s house. By then it was night, and Leakey
was not home. A servant allowed Molt to rest on the couch and brought
him tea, while Molt took in his elegant surroundings—terraces and gar-
dens, oriental rugs and carvings, the frog calls from the lake’s edge, and the
smell of teak furniture. The generator shut off, and it was dark. Molt tried
to sleep, only to be roused by a growling in his face. A caracal, with tall,
tufted ears, was investigating him.
Jonathan Leakey ran a snake farm and a melon farm on this sprawling
lakefront homestead, and unlike his famous parents and brother, he was
more interested in money than in digging up fossil hominids. At twenty-
nine, Molt’s age exactly, Leakey had a reputation already compromised by
the frequent deaths of his employees, who got killed packing his poison-

ous snakes. Leakey was surprised to find Molt on his couch, but obligingly
shuttled him around the lake, with its wading hippos and flocks of flamin-
gos. He radioed to have Molt’s wreck of a Fiat repaired well enough for a
return trip to Nairobi, where Molt left it parked in the rental lot, with a
polite note and nonworking credit card number. He had a plane to catch.
With him was his bag of Madagascar ground boas and some little horned
vipers from Kenya, which he bagged and stuffed into a sneaker. He left
for home, where a customs officer picked up Molt’s sneaker, and seemed
poised to insert a probing hand into its toe, when he changed his mind and
returned the sneaker to Molt’s suitcase, sparing himself an excruciating and
noteworthy death.
NOT MUCH could keep Molt at home after that. As a husband, he was
indifferent on a good day. The Angolan pythons arrived from South Africa
and turned out to be stunning after all, a beautiful caramel brown with
rounded scales like beads and white, lightning-shaped markings on their
sides.Yet the high Molt felt on opening a crate of the world’s rarest snakes
quickly gave way to boredom and wanderlust. He let Bob Udell take over
the pet shop while he retooled himself into the itinerant reptile collector
he longed to be. Molt changed his business ads. Instead of classifieds for
forty-dollar pythons in the Philadelphia Daily News, it was full columns in
the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums directories.
“SPECIAL COLLECTING TRIPS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD
AT NO RISK TO YOU,” Molt now promised. “YOU PAY ONLY FOR
RESULTS!!”
In 1971, Molt and Leon Leopard fell out over shipments Leopard
continued to receive from New Guinea. Molt had a feeling Leopard was
getting more animals than he claimed, and not paying Molt his half. Molt
phoned around to the zoos to see who had what animals, then billed them,
ostensibly on the partnership’s behalf, pocketing $6,000. Just in case Leop-
ard thought of trying the same, Molt sent the zoos an emergency bulletin:

Stolen World 29
“Until further written notice, no person(s) or business other than myself,

Henry A. Molt, is authorized to represent PHILADELPHIA REPTILE
EXCHANGE in any respect whatsoever.” Incidentally, he added on the
bottom of the page, “I am planning to leave shortly on an extensive col-
lecting trip to South East Asia and the Pacific.”
After Africa, the world seemed smaller to Molt, and Leon Leopard’s
achievements less extraordinary. New Guinea no longer sounded far or
foreboding. Molt would fly there and seek Leopard’s coffee farmer in the
highlands, undercutting Leopard. On the way he would stop over in Syd-
ney to see Henry Szoke, purveyor of marvelous illegal Australian animals,
whom Molt knew nothing about and was very curious to meet. Szoke told
Molt he was welcome to visit, but he had something to confess, he said: He
was not Henry Szoke.
Henry Szoke did not exist. Henry Szoke was Stefan Schwarz, a Ger-
man from Stuttgart. He would explain the rest when they met.
STEFAN SCHWARZ was not tall, and he walked with a slight limp, but he
was tan and handsome, a few years older than Molt. His German accent
was barely detectable under his Australian one.Together Schwarz and Molt
made an abbreviated tour of Sydney—the still-uncompleted Opera House,
the harbor, and the botanical gardens.
“Within hours he had told me his whole life story,” Molt said.
Schwarz had been born in Stuttgart to a family of academics. Most of
them still lived there, except his sister Gisela, who had also emigrated to
Australia, and was married to a Hungarian named Szoke.
Before leaving for Australia, Schwarz had been a keeper at the Stutt-
gart Zoo. The Germans, along with the Belgians and the Dutch, possessed
some of the finest and oldest zoos in the world, and skilled keepers like
Schwarz fanned out to guide new zoos as they sprung up on other conti-
nents. In Sydney, Schwarz became general curator of the Australian Reptile
Park, which had emerged in the 1950s from a venom-extracting operation

just like those common then in the American South—except that instead of
rattlesnakes, the Australians milked the insanely deadly and fast-moving tai-
pans. Schwarz continued to maintain his ties to zoos in Europe, and in 1964
he finessed for the reptile park Australia’s last big legal importation of foreign
reptiles, a huge sampling from dealers and zoos in Germany, the Netherlands,
and Belgium, which arrived in Australia on a Dutch freighter. Schwarz ac-
companied the reptiles for the ten-thousand-mile journey, changing dirty
snake bags and administering live rodents. When an Amazon tree boa died
toward the end, only a few miles offshore of Melbourne, Schwarz blithely
tossed it overboard. A young man found it on the beach and toted it to the
National Museum, whose head herpetologist embarrassed himself with wild
hypotheses of how the snake had crossed the Pacific.
Years later, when he was settled in Sydney, Schwarz took it upon him-
self to return the European zoos’ generosity. He boarded a plane to Stutt-
gart with a Tasmanian devil in his hand luggage. He collected monitors and
snakes in Australia and New Zealand, sending them to Europe in his red
boxes labeled “art.”
When Molt came to visit, Schwarz was in the process of divorcing his
German-born wife. He was leaving Sydney and the zoo, moving north to a
property in Cairns. There he would build a private collection of reptiles in
pits and wooden cages, and expand his side business in cane toads. Schwarz
collected the monstrous invasive toads and sold them, dead and preserved,
for dissection and novelty wallets. He was finished with zoos; now, for the
foreseeable future, it would be cane toads and smuggling.
Schwarz and Molt got on like brothers. They visited the zoos and for-
ests of New South Wales and slept under the stars. They sensed, even then,
that they would be working together a long time.
IN PORT Moresby, Papua New Guinea, Molt boarded at the Civic Guest
House, a hostel run by an Australian widow who fed her guests in a
common mess. The Civic Guest House was Molt’s type of place—a frat

Stolen World 31
house. He drank away the thick humid nights with American service-
men and a guy hunting for downed Japanese warplanes. Already, he liked
New Guinea. It was, in its way, crazier than Africa. The roads around Port
Moresby teemed at night with snakes, and Molt would enlist the Ameri-
cans to pile into his rental car and go hunting. They drove in heavy rains
along the Brown River, packing a rifle and machetes and a case of South
Pacific lager, taking pains not to hit any dogs.
Unfortunately no Boelen’s pythons lived along the Brown River.
These Molt would have to get from the highlands. Leon Leopard had
been the first to bring them back alive, which annoyed Molt. He would
just have to bring back more.
All Molt knew of Leopard’s coffee farmer was that he lived in a place
called Wau. Two flights a week left Port Moresby for the Wau airstrip, and
Molt boarded a plane so small that passengers had to be weighed before
boarding. Its wing had been bandaged with what appeared to be duct tape.
Pilots in Papua New Guinea were mostly Australians who shuttled
mail into the mines and plantations of the highlands. They knew where
everyone lived. And so Molt found himself, without extraordinary effort,
a guest of Peter Shanahan, Leon Leopard’s supplier and the biggest cof-
fee farmer in Wau. Shanahan lived with his American wife in a plantation
home on a grassy hill, where thick fogs blocked the sun for days at a time.
They were attended to by tenant farmers and servants who called Shana-
han “master,” which simultaneously creeped Molt out and thrilled him.
Shanahan was a third-generation New Guinean, thirty-one years old.
His maternal grandfather, a German, had planted the country’s first coffee
farm with seeds smuggled from Jamaica. Shanahan’s parents had sent him
to boarding school in Sydney, but he was called back before college—fam-
ily fortunes, once huge from gold mining, were flagging, reduced to the
coffee plots. Shanahan’s dreams of becoming a biologist were shelved to
save them.Yet Shanahan ended up a skilled and sought-after animal collec-
tor even as he farmed coffee. He netted butterflies for the Bishop Museum
in Honolulu, and birds of paradise for the Rotterdam Zoo.
Shanahan had seen his first Boelen’s python only a few years before, in
the mountains above Wau. It was sunning itself in a tree, its skin shimmer-

ing like taffeta. Finding a python at that altitude, Shanahan said, “was like,
‘What the heck?’ It was a snake I hadn’t seen before, very pretty. I made a
big pole and hooked it. When I looked around they were quite common.”
Shanahan collected several. He did not know what to call them.
When Leon Leopard arrived in Wau one day, wearing his ersatz zoo
uniform, he showed Shanahan photos of the very same snake.“Leon Leop-
ard. Central Texas Zoo,” the Texan announced, extending his hand.
“That shook me up,” Shanahan said. “I had never heard an accent like
that before.”
Shanahan didn’t know what to make of Leopard, except that “he had a
big opinion of himself and was full of stories. And he lived on Parrot Street,
which was weird.” Leopard didn’t seem to know much about wildlife,
which was odd for a zoo man—“but back then there weren’t the books,”
Shanahan said. “Even the common species, we didn’t know what they
were. Libraries didn’t exist in Wau.”
Up in the Wau hills, any white visitor was accommodated—people
were bored, and reflexively gracious in the colonial fashion. Leopard
also came equipped with the approval of the wildlife department in Port
Moresby, and as a licensed collector it was Shanahan’s job to provide. Sha-
nahan’s wife, though, quietly made copies of Leopard’s documents. The
Texan was, in her estimation,“a spiv, a cheat,” and maybe not a zoo man at all.
Now, only a year or so since Leopard’s visit, here was Hank Molt:
younger, far more knowledgeable, and every bit as suspect. “Hank worked
on impressing,” Shanahan said. “He was Mr. Sophisticated. He knew his
stuff, that was pretty obvious—not birds and mammals, but reptiles.” He
wondered whether Molt had really fallen out with Leopard, as Molt had
claimed, or whether the two were setting him up. “I was just a hick,” said
Shanahan. “We could handle crocodiles and cyclones but these boys from
the city were something else.”
Shanahan was sitting on tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of animals
Leopard had ordered, “a spectacular collection,” Shanahan said, but Leop-
ard had delayed so long in arriving that Shanahan had become panicked.
He would dump it for a pittance if he had to, just to cover his costs. And
now here was Molt. It certainly seemed like a setup.

Stolen World 33
Molt offered to buy all the animals, to get Shanahan out of a bind.
“Hank actually took out his checkbook,” Shanahan said. “Right then and
there.” But Shanahan said he would have to wait for Leopard. And then
Leopard called.
Molt said he’d like to stick around awhile longer.
MOLT SAT on Shanahan’s porch, staring at the hills, drinking a South Pa-
cific lager. He had come to New Guinea hoping to make $250,000. He
would be lucky, now, if he broke even. It was a failure, but failure can be
mitigated by small reprisals, and Molt had one in mind.
A nervous Shanahan had driven off in his old Land Rover that morn-
ing to collect Leon Leopard at the airport in Port Moresby. This would
have been a relief to Shanahan, but then, there was Molt still drinking beer
on his porch, for reasons that were not clear to him, and Molt had insisted
that Shanahan say nothing to Leopard about him. “That whole situation
caused me so much angst and trouble,” Shanahan said. “I never knew how
to handle these guys. I just figured I had to bring them together.”
It was evening when the Land Rover returned. Shanahan’s servants
were relaxing on the grass, chatting and picking lice from one another’s
hair. Molt waved from the porch. Leopard had to squint, shut the car door,
then amble closer on his long, slender legs.
The entire reason Molt had remained in Wau was to savor Leon Leop-
ard’s expression. It was a stricken one, just as he’d hoped: wide-eyed, pale, a
hint of bile rising to the throat.
“Mercy, mercy,” said Leopard. That was enough for Molt.
AN INVIGORATED Molt flew on to Fiji. He introduced himself to mu-

seum officials as a zoologist.

The museum men, expatriate Britons, directed Molt to the island of

Ovalau, where children followed him wherever he wandered. He drank
kava in a thatched hut with two kindly brothers, who taught him the
words for the two species he sought—the Fiji banded iguana was voiki,
and the Fiji boa nanka. Both were seriously coveted by zoos. In the United
States, only the San Diego Zoo had ever exhibited Fiji iguanas—demure,
emerald-colored creatures, the males bearing stripes of robin’s-egg blue,
that are by some unexplained phenomenon related to the iguanas of Cen-
tral America and the Caribbean, seven thousand miles away. Leon Leopard
and Molt, in happier days, had made a pilgrimage to San Diego to view a
pair of Fijis. They were taken aback by the iguanas’ diminutive size, their
alert red eyes, and their jewel colors.
On Ovalau, the brothers assembled some kids to catch Molt’s nankas
and voikis. To Molt’s dismay, the kids set the trees on fire, raining reptiles
to the ground and charring them in the process. Giant tree-dwelling crabs
had nipped off the boas’ tails, so they were stubby as well as charred. Molt
climbed a tree after a Fiji iguana, to demonstrate its proper capture. He fell
from the treetop into a brook, then rose from the water with one lizard
triumphantly in hand. Molt returned to Philadelphia with a crate of them.
When Molt delivered his iguanas to the zoos, he made sure to tell a
story, like Leon Leopard before him.
There were four or five women on the base of this tree all point-
ing up and yelling “voiki! voiki!” Finally I saw it—it was a solid
green female. I started climbing the tree, pursuing this thing from
branch to branch. Higher and higher it went onto smaller and
smaller branches, eluding me at a deliberate pace. All of a sudden
it’s about to hop over to the next tree! I lunge my body forward
so I go crashing out of the tree right into a stream of water six feet
deep. But the iguana is in my hand and I rise slowly from the wa-
ter, wielding it above my head, like the Statue of fucking Liberty.
He sold them all.

Stolen World by Jennie Erin Smith - Excerpt

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Stolen World by Jennie Erin Smith - Excerpt

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Copyright © 2011 by Jennie Erin Smith

All rights reserved.

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Jennie Erin, 1973–

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Book design by Donna Sinisgalli

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd iv 11/3/10 11:18 AM

Molt next showed me what he considered to be his most valuable

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 7 11/3/10 11:18 AM

When Molt’s workdays of counting mayonnaise jars and issuing cred-

BEFORE RESIGNING himself to a career at Kraft, Molt had presented

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 8 11/3/10 11:18 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 9 11/3/10 11:18 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 10 11/3/10 11:18 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 11 11/3/10 11:18 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 12 11/3/10 11:18 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 13 11/3/10 11:18 AM

When Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 14 11/3/10 11:18 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 15 11/3/10 11:18 AM

I know a man on the staff of a great museum who by the hour

Stretched in undulating fashion in the trunk of a fallen tree, lay

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 16 11/3/10 11:18 AM

A strong odor of Frank Buck now permeated Ditmars’s prose. Indeed

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 17 11/3/10 11:18 AM

MOLT QUIT Kraft Foods. With his mother-in-law’s money, he bought a

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 18 11/3/10 11:18 AM

perfect display quality.” He joined the American Association of Zoological

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 19 11/3/10 11:18 AM

THANKS TO Megot Schetty in Switzerland, Molt now had the Dumeril’s

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 20 11/3/10 11:18 AM

THANKFULLY, MOLT’S institutional clients seldom visited his retail shop,

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 21 11/3/10 11:19 AM

A PECULIAR man phoned the Philadelphia Reptile Exchange one day.

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 22 11/3/10 11:19 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 23 11/3/10 11:19 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 24 11/3/10 11:19 AM

THE MARINES cut Molt loose in the summer of 1970. In anticipation

ZOOL OGICA L EXPED IT ION

Au thor i ze d Agen t for:

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 25 11/3/10 11:19 AM

with a grainy image of a dead specimen in liquid, from an old German

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 26 11/3/10 11:19 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 27 11/3/10 11:19 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 28 11/3/10 11:19 AM

“Until further written notice, no person(s) or business other than myself,

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 29 11/3/10 11:19 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 30 11/3/10 11:19 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 31 11/3/10 11:19 AM

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 32 11/3/10 11:19 AM

AN INVIGORATED Molt flew on to Fiji. He introduced himself to mu-

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 33 11/3/10 11:19 AM

The museum men, expatriate Britons, directed Molt to the island of

He sold them all.

Smit_9780307381477_5p_all_r1.indd 34 11/3/10 11:19 AM

You might also like